How I reduced my server response time and increased PageSpeed score

You are searching for some information on Google that you need urgently. You’ve seen a search result that fulfill your needs and you clicked on the link. It took almost 20 seconds to load the page. Will you continue staying on the site? Obviously, NO! You will push the ‘back’ button and go with another result.

Page loading speed is a major factor that will make your website a king. Don’t let your site unidentified.

You are not only the person suffering from high page loading time. If your site loads more than 5 seconds you will lose 8 out of (any) 10 visitors.

The tips given below can be done on free of charge.

My issues on PageSpeed:

Server response time – Just before a week, I purchased my hosting from Hostmetro who is a reliable web hosting provider. I was in process of transferring my WordPress files to the new host. When I was on my previous host, my server responded in about 600 ms. But new host has good response than the previous one. Even though the new one has some good response time, it doesn’t equals how dedicated servers give.

Images – Most of my images were large in large size and it need to be optimized.

Leverage browser caching – I need to optimize caching.

Enable compression – My blog on the new server needs to be compressed.

Are you being troubled with these issues? I have some ways to boost up your PageSpeed score:

If you are looking for the solutions to fix these issues, continue reading.

Before entering into any other sections go to Google PageSpeed Test tool and calculate your website score. Note down it somewhere.

Reduce server response time to under 200ms (Major factor to consider):

Long web server response times delay page loading speeds. Page Speed expects your server to begin responding to resource requests quickly to ensure a quick page load time. For each resource request, your server needs to begin sending the first byte of the resource within 200ms of the request being sent. — GTmetrix

According to me, server response time is the time taken by the server to complete the request made out by the user. It is counted in milliseconds. Lesser the milliseconds your sever response, higher the page loading speed you will have. It’s all up to your web-hosting server. Most of the shared web hosting servers have poor server response time compared to dedicated servers.

But you can improve your server response time, even if you are on a shared web hosting. Sign up for Google PageSpeed service. It’s free now but Google might make it paid somewhat later. Fill up this spreadsheet form and get an invite from PageSpeed team: Google PageSpeed Service

You can also do this by using any CDNs. Check your PageSpeed after implementing this step.

Optimizing Images without losing image quality:

Images says 1000 words. Images are necessary for a post. A post should have at least 1 image. But large size images will affect the loading speed of your website. But you can optimize images without losing it’s quality by these tools.

Leverage browser caching – It’s easy to do with W3 Total Cache plugin:

WordPress is basically a dynamic site that runs with PHP. When you are loading a webpage your browser will download static files like images, HTML, Javascript, CSS files. You should optimize your caching system in order to get a better page loading speed as well as better user experience. My friend Aditya has written an awesome post on how to optimize caching using W3 Total cache plugin: The Ultimate guide to W3 Total cache settings.

Top WordPress plugins to optimize caching:

If you are running on any other blogging platforms like Blogger, Google PageSpeed service does the work for you.

Enable compression- Use the powerful Gzip compression:

What will you do before uploading large sized files to any downloading sites? Obviously, compressing those. This is applicable for this case too. You should compress your files before sending it to your readers. It will reduce your loading speed to a great extent.

Enabling Gzip compression in your WordPress site:

Most of the WordPress site are running in Apache server. Apache servers uses .htaccess as the directory level configuration file. Read more here : .htaccess

You can enable gzip compression by adding a piece of code in your .htaccess file.